Legislation is often created not because a government wishes to arrest or fine people who engage in a certain behaviour, but because they want to encourage people never to behave that way in the first place. Sometimes legislation is written in such a way that it is very confusing and people cannot know how it will be enforced, or sometimes the requirements it sets out for a certain scenario are impossible to meet. This is true of legislation which seeks to require age verification for all adult content, which means porn sites and social media sites which host adult content must decide whether to risk being prosecuted under certain interpretations of poorly written laws… or whether to drop adult content or block an entire state or country from being able to access the site.
From the perspective of sites who host the adult content, blocking a region or dropping certain kinds of content can be a logical business decision. On the grand scale, as a society, it plays right into what many lawmakers want when they push these confusing bills in the first place. They hope that businesses will do exactly this; many want to get rid of porn sites entirely and if they voluntarily cut back their own reach then it’s even easier for them.
In practice, this has what we call a “chilling effect”.
The Online Safety Bill in the UK, for example, followed on from previous legislation which tried to require that sites age-verify all users trying to access porn. The Online Safety Bill is nowhere near so strict as that, but does require that companies have procedures in place to stop minors from accessing their sites and they must demonstrate this. Naturally, how they are supposed to do so is vague. It is claimed by some that the vagueness is to prioritize making it easy for companies to comply, but in reality it means that they often do not know how strictly they must age gate certain content and it causes them to err on the side of being over-cautious.
The UK is not the only place to have these issues. There’s SB 287: Online Pornography Viewing Age Requirements in Utah, which caused a big fuss when it ultimately made PornHub block the entire state so they wouldn’t have to contend with the unreasonable regulations. The bill, to give a quick summary, requires porn sites to verify the age of every user; to verify all users ages, porn sites like PornHub would need to collect extremely sensitive documents from all of their users like their IDs and would have to absorb the cost of verifying each user. Since tube sites make their money from advertising, verifying every user would cost porn sites more money than they make from each user of the platform. In addition, there are massive privacy concerns to a company like PornHub having personal information that sensitive, especially when it would be connected to someone’s porn-watching habits. Do you want someone to be able to connect the exact porn you watch to your full name and where you live? Do you trust porn sites to keep that information safe?
France in particular is a country where MPs have been very open that they’re perfectly happy for their age verification laws to result in porn sites disappearing entirely, with Jean-Noel Barrot (France’s digital minister) proposing that those living in France will have to download a government app to give them a code once they verify their age, only then being able to access porn online. This will, of course, protect no-one, because kids will simply share these codes with each other, but will cause a massive breach in people’s privacy. Naturally, sites are being threatened with being banned if they do not comply.
As these sites block certain areas and become more restricted, other smaller platforms pop up and get more use. Those sites are less likely to respond to DMCAs to take down stolen sex worker content, are less likely to have moderation and safety measures in place, and most crucially do not generally give sex workers a way to earn money from them other than exposure and directing people to their own separate websites.
All of the focus from most media outlets seems to be on the viewers and whether or not these age verification changes will protect children (they won’t). Practically none of them even think to cover how these changes will effect sex workers, so I will.
The chilling effect that stricter age verification has on porn sites means that the people who would otherwise have turned to online sex work are more likely to choose to sell sex in-person instead if they cannot do online work. You’ll often hear people say that online sex work is over-saturated, but that’s people simplifying the truth by a lot; online sex work is engaged in by a lot of people and now is the largest the industry has been because the internet and online porn taking off is a relatively recent thing. What’s really happening is that it’s difficult to advertise online porn as a singular sex worker, and the few places we have left to advertise are other porn sites and on social media.
Depending on how strict these rules become, alongside other legislation which restricts adult content from being posted on social media sites like Twitter… eventually we have nowhere we can advertise beyond posting a link and maybe mentioning in vague terms that you can find porn there once you age-verify and pay. If you can’t post nudes first, can’t post clips from your porn to advertise, have less of an ability to reach people on the large and legitimate porn sites because their userbase has been restricted, you can’t make as much money. People doing online sex work are typically doing because they need the money badly enough that the stigma is worth it, and that need for money doesn’t go away when it’s harder to get online clients. So, we go into in-person sex work, in which you can make larger sums of money in a faster way even as a newbie.
Advertising escorting profiles also becomes more difficult as adult context is restricted and gated, so you have to rely on shadier sites and even third parties to make money. That might mean working in a brothel, using an agency, or selling sex more informally through word of mouth and being stuck with regular clients who are abusive because you can’t get other clients to replace that income.
Some people may see the loss of access to these larger porn sites as inconsequential, or even as a good thing because it breaks up their monopoly a little, however those people aren’t considering the impact on the most vulnerable sex workers who gradually lose the access to, or utility of, these sites they use for safety.
There are many problems with age verification and I don’t blame people whose first thoughts are about how this is an unhelpful restriction that doesn’t help kids but does restrict access to porn for the adults who want to watch it. I’m not upset that people are talking about the ramifications of these laws in terms of their impact on our privacy, or that they’re discussing how this personal data being connected to our porn habits could be used to blackmail or harm people or scare them away from watching the content. What I am concerned about is that, as usual, sex workers seem to be the last of people’s concern. It’s all about the people who will find it harder to watch porn and not about the people who suddenly won’t be able to make a living from creating it.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 